News

If Eurozone Collapses, Visa Is Ready
July 02, 2012

The Wall Street Journal reports that Visa is preparing for a potential collapse of the eurozone. Steve Perry, chief commercial official at Visa, told the WSJ that Visa is exploring various possible outcomes, including a total collapse of the eurozone: “From our perspective, we can...

News
Mobile Money Merger: Monitise Buys Clairmail for $173 Million
March 26, 2012

Mobile money firm Monetise acquired Clairmail in a deal valued near $173 million. The combined firm will provide mobile money services to 13 million registered end users, and process more than $10 billion a year in transactions based on current weekly rates. Had the companies...

Green Dot Corporation Announces Federal Reserve Board Approval of its Application to Acquire Bonneville Bancorp
November 23, 2011

Green Dot Corporation (NYSE: GDOT), a leading prepaid financial services company (“Green Dot”), today announced that its application to acquire Bonneville Bancorp (“Bonneville”) and thereby become a bank holding company under the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 has been approved by the Board of...

Commentary
eBay Makes Major Play in Social Commerce Sector with New “Project”
September 10, 2011

eBay has acquired the platform and personnel from the Gifts Project, an Israeli social commerce venture that lets groups of friends come together to purchase a particular present. “The Gifts Project has been powering eBay’s version of the concept called Group Gifts for almost a...

Commentary
Oh, Duh! Payments’ Most Obvious (Yet Overlooked) Best Practice
August 19, 2011

Sometimes it helps to be reminded of the stunningly obvious. You know, like if you want to lose weight, why not just eat less and exercise more? My favorite business example is don’t compete where there’s lots of competition. Blue Ocean Strategy became an enormous...

Commentary
mPayments Trust: Google or Facebook?
August 17, 2011

Familiarity breeds trust, it seems, especially when it comes to mobile payments. By now, everyone and his mother-in-law has seen last week’s survey results touting Visa, MasterCard and AmEx as the top three trusted brands when it comes to mobile payments, with PayPal posting a...

Commentary
Will Zong Make eBay the Future of Retail Commerce?
July 07, 2011

eBay’s announcement yesterday of its acquisition of Zong is just another interesting example of this e-commerce giant’s grand ambition to change the face of retail as merchants and consumers know it and experience it today. Here’s what I mean. Retail Nirvana as envisioned by eBay...

Commentary
Dangers of Assuming Invincibility – Could Your Firm Go the Way of the Typewriter Makers?
June 29, 2011

There was a lot of great stuff that came out of the Payments Innovation Institute at Harvard last week but two anecdotes that have absolutely nothing to do with payments specifically, I think, provide some of the more thought provoking insights around the pitfalls and...

Commentary
Why Facebook is Ripe for Commerce
June 22, 2011

I have always been up for a challenge. I read just last week a quote from someone from Forrester who basically said that anyone who believes Facebook is the commerce frontier is basically smoking something. (Well, what he said was that they had about as...